This is most likely going to be the last post that I write on this blog. There are a whole variety of reasons for this, and I'll try to explain them in what follows. 

When I first started up this blog just over two years ago I was on a sabbatical from my 'day job' and beginning to explore what emerging church was all about. The blog was a place to play around with ideas, get some unformed stuff down on (virtual) paper and begin to make some connections with similarly thinking people - and to that extent it has been enormously helpful and encouraging. But, for a while now, blogging has been a bit of a chore. I've struggled to think of things to say that I haven't already written about and, although my perspective has shifted quite dramatically over the past couple of years, I feel that I've now arrived in a place where I'm comfortable and reasonably 'settled'. That doesn't mean that I've nothing left to learn, but simply that I'm no longer on that 'journey' where blogging can be so therapeutic.

I've also become aware that too much of my time, including what is jokingly referred to as 'spare time' (!), is being taken up with stuff that directly relates to my ministry. I'm a Vicar, an Area Dean, An Evangelism Adviser to the Diocese in my 'real job' - so what do I do to chill out? I maintain an emerging church blog (plus two other websites) read books about emerging church, run an emerging church forum and do an MA in....you guessed it... emerging church!! I seriously need to 'get a life'. And now that I'm involved in planting and leading an emerging church plant - in other words 'doing it' instead of simply reading 'about it', I think I need to pull back a bit and get involved in some stuff that has nothing to do with emerging church!

So, what I am going to do? Well, I dunno really! I'm closing this blog as from today and plan to take a good long break from reading any more stuff on missional / emerging topics. I'll leave this blog here - at least until the current hosting runs out later in the year - as a reference for people who might find some of the things useful. I've got a few ideas in the back of my mind for little hobby projects - things that I've had in mind to do for a while but just never had the time. So maybe I'll find the time to do some really different things...

I suppose all that remains is to thank anyone and everyone who has ever read stuff on Out of the Cocoon, especially the much smaller number who have ever left a comment. Maybe one day I'll get the urge to blog somewhere else or perhaps I'll just restrict myself to commenting on some of the other great blogs out there? Or perhaps I've struggled 'out of the cocoon' and just need to focus on my life and ministry for a while? Who knows...

It's been a while since I mentioned 'rethinking church' so I figured it was time for a plug...

Rethinking Church is a small, members-only, discussion forum that I set up to host conversations about all things missional and emerging. we've got about 90 members currently and have recently passed the 1000 post landmark - so its not exactly prolific by comparison with some forums. However, the conversation is thoughtful, considered and respectful - I'm enjoying the insights enormously.

If you like to join with us, then head over to rethinking church and sign up as a member.

Over the last two weeks I've been ploughing through the fifteen different reasons why people are leaving the church according to Leslie Francis and Philip Richter's recent book 'Gone for Good'.  In this final post of the series I want to pull it all together with a look at their final chapter in which they come to some tentative conclusions about possible ways forward.

The metaphor that is developed here is that of the 'multiplex' church.

Our vision of the church of the future is that of the 'multiplex' church. The multiplex church offers different perspectives on the same faith, different perspectives on the same eternal truths. Seekers after the kingdom of God will be able to enter this multiplex church through many different doors and celebrate their participation within the kingdom of God in many different ways. Just as there are many front doors into this multiplex church, so there are many different back doors..... While some of these back doors properly lead directly into the 'outside world', others lead directly into different expressions of church

 The remainder of the chapter then briefly assesses how the multiplex model might impact the fifteen themes of church leavers that we have already addressed. In some ways it is an enticing vision but there are a couple of difficulties that are not addressed.

Firstly, there is no real assessment into the practicalities of how multiplex churches could develop. It would presumably mean that end of the current parochial system (Anglican) or even localised indigenous churches (Free churches), in favour of geographically wider 'Minster' type churches. There is certainly no practical way that the vast majority of churches in the UK could offer the range and diversity of services that are being suggested here. I'm not at all clear as to how this could happen when many churchgoers are strongly self-identified with a specific building, local congregation and distinct pattern of attending - it cannot be guaranteed that all of these people would gravitate to the multiplex-type model.

In fact, it seems to me that trying to shift to something like this could accelerate church leaving to unprecedented levels! Perhaps that is necessary for something genuinely new to emerge....

Secondly, much of the book is based on the assumption that 'church attendance' is something that must be preserved at all costs. Perhaps that's something that is just inherent in the topic, but I didn't see much in the book about the need for discipleship,  building community and serving in the wider community - everything seemed to be about getting more people to 'come to us'. And there was nothing at all in the book about emerging churches, missional communities, neo-monasticism, alt.worship or anything else that offers alternative models for the Christian journey. As I say, this might simply be that the authors were working to a narrow and specific 'brief' - but I'd like to have seen at least an acknowledgement of alternative journeys. As it stands, the 'multiplex' model is still a 'come-to-us', attractional model, albeit one that is more interesting and diverse than normal.

Finally, there wasn't a great deal in the book that seemed to be genuinely missional. There was a lot of talk about how we could woo back those who had left the existing church, and careful analysis of the likelihood to that happening. But the statistics also show that the 'open dechurched'  (to use the jargon) are declining group within society - and are likely to become more or less extinct in coming decades. How is the 'multiplex' church meant to engage with those who have never even been 'churched' in the first place?

As the title of this post might suggest, I'm talking about two chapter at once here - those who leave churches because they church is seen as too conservative, and those who leave because it is too liberal!

You've only got to spend a few minutes looking at Christian forums on the Web to discern that there are plenty of people who are happy to apportion blame for falling church attendances on those from an opposite theological camp. On conservative evangelical forums the 'bete noires' are those pesky liberals with their wishy-washy understanding of Scripture and compromise on morals. Surf over to a more liberally inclined forum and people will be demonizing 'evos' for their hard line judgementalism, lack of tolerance, homophobia and archaic views on Scripture.

What is really interesting - although perhaps not that surprising - is the statistics from interviews conducted by Richter and Francis that show that the numbers who leave because of issues with these kinds of theological issues are pretty well equal. In other words, the numbers of people leaving because the church is too conservative is almost exactly mirrored by those who leave because the church is too liberal!

So the authors conclude, on the one hand

between one fifth and one third of church leavers associated their disengagement from church with a growing sense of frustration with what they saw to be the church's conservative thinking and practice. They were increasingly tired of being told by the church what to believe and how to behave.

 ...and then on the other hand

up to a quarter of church leavers associated their disengagement with church with a growing sense of frustration with what they saw to be the church's lack of clear teaching or the lack of clear boundaries separating the church from the world. They were frustrated the church's failure to provide clear teaching or a firm moral lead.

Hmmm.

What is interesting to note is that it was the older generation who tended to be more likely to leave because of liberalism, and the younger generation that were more likely to leave because of conservatism. That's no great surprise, but it does pose fundamental questions about how those churches at the more evangelical end of the spectrum are going to respond in the future. Whilst some of the bigger megachurch-type outfits seem to be able to corner the market in conservatively inclined young people, the vast majority of churches seem to becoming bereft of anyone under 40 years old. This is only going to increase in scale as we move further into post modernism.

The question of whether the evangelical church, especially here in the UK, can respond is something that is going to have to be faced soon if we are not to sleepwalk into terminal decline and become a church which does little more than pastor an ageing and declining minority. 

I guess it was inevitable that following hard on the heels of a chapter about 'worship issues' would be something about 'leadership issues'. It is certainly no surprise to me that a significant proportion of church leavers (about a quarter) cited leadership as a factor in their leaving

Again, as with the worship issues, there were wildly differing perspectives about leadership. Some people left church because the leadership was too authoritarian, others left because it wasn't authoritarian enough. Go figure. It seems that some people craved democratic and participative structures, whilst others just wanted 'the leader to lead'....

Within the more detailed analysis were the insights that for some people the issue surrounded the role of women (or rather their lack of role) in church leadership. Unsurprisingly this was an issue in some Roman Catholic leavers, but also equally in those from the more charismatic / house church end of the spectrum. There were differences in the age breakdown too, with those in the younger age group preferring a more consensual style of leadership and the older generation tending to gravitate to 'up front' leadership.

Again, we are thrown back onto the conclusion that different styles of leadership work for different kinds of people. I know, in my own experience, that I've seen people leave my own church and join up with highly authoritarian independent churches - it seems that some would simply prefer to be 'led' than participate in leadership themselves.

As with the worship issue, no one church or church 'structure' works for everyone or in every situation, and we are going to have to learn to be much more gracious in working with other local churches to make sure that people find a suitable spiritual home rather than simply falling between the cracks....

We touched on the issues of change management in the last  blog on Francis and Richter's 'Gone for Good' book, and the next chapter develops that theme with a look at almost certainly the most contentious and sensitive area of change - worship.

 Worship touches something profound at the core of our being, and - without quite realising it - becomes wrapped up in the identity that we have as Christians. For this reason, anything which challenges or disturbs our preconceptions about worship is s0mething that is pretty well guaranteed to be a touchy subject. For a few people, it becomes so wounding that they feel they have no option but to opt out of worship altogether - the cry goes up 'it doesn't feel like worship anymore'...

What were the key themes discovered by Francis and Richter?

• Matters of Style - for equal numbers it was felt to either too formal or too informal
• Matters of Taste - felt to some to be too mechanical, lacking in the presence of God or ritualised
• Matters of Content - for some this was about things being pitched too high, for others it was pitched on the level of the banal or childish

For the 30% of church leavers who expressed problems with church worship it is about whether the felt needs match up to the provision. Of course, from a missional perspective we have to ask whether expecting worship to 'meet my needs' is reasonable. Isn't worship meant to be about God? Surely, we have to do better than simply providing a tepid, lowest-common-denominator style of worship? On the other hand, if people are driven away from even attending, then they aren't going to be around to be challenged and encouraged to lift their vision onto something more biblical.

My quick reaction to this chapter is that the one-size-fits-all diet of worship is no longer enough - and yet I see that is precisely what many churches are providing. That's not just a comment about the more traditional churches either - I see little variety or richness in the big megachurches either. Surely those of us who are 'professional' worship facilitators can provide more richness, diversity and variety in what is offered in our churches.

The crucial observation is that tastes in worship so clearly vary from one individual to another. Some despair of the church because of its informality, and others despair of the church because of its formality. Clearly, one form of service is not going to woo back the church leavers or even keep the loyalty of today's church goers.  

You've probably heard the hoary old joke.  Question :  How many Anglicans does it take to change a light bulb?  Answer : Change? What is 'change'?

Just why is it that so many Christians find change so problematic that they end up leaving the Church that might have worshipped in for most of their lives?  The study found that at least one in every five church leavers cited the changes that were happening in their church as a significant factor in their leaving.

For many it was to do with what was perceived as the rise of new forms of worship - hymns, music, liturgy, bible translations -that have accelerated into common use in the past thirty years or so. Some church leavers spoke of a sense of everything constantly changing around them - with new features and elements being introduced very quickly, and often with minimal consultation. There was - certainly for some - a feeling of 'change for changes sake' - quite often associated with the arrival of a new minister. In such cases, the new minister - possibly introducing changes after a long period of stability - who became demonized as a focus (even a scapegoat) for the church leaving.

Certainly, in my own ministry, I have heard people speak about the Church as the one and only solid, stable and unchanging piece of their lives. For many people, living in a very fast moving world where things at work, in the home and in their personal lives may be changing very rapidly - and often outside their control - the Church is somewhere where people want to feel secure in things that they have always known. One minister in the book comments

I'm not just changing something on the edge of their lives. I'm changing, or seeking to change, something to do with their inmost being. And it is no wonder then that they get upset when that sort of thing happens. It's actually one of the reasons that I try not to do it.

Unfortunately we have the problem that whilst it might be tempting to follow the pattern of the minister quoted above, and allow people to experience church as a haven of peace from an ever-changing world, it is likely make us increasingly irrelevant to the unchurched. And, in any case, the statistics all point to the fact that this group who wish to retain this kind of inherited Christianity is shrinking all the time, and will gradually cease to exist at all in coming decades.

Somehow we've got to find a way to support and minister to that declining group of people, whilst opening up the remainder of the church to a much more missional focus that seeks to engage with the contemporary world in which we live nowadays. I don't see how the Anglican parochial model with its idea of the local parish church which tries to suit everyone is going work anymore.

Perhaps we need to be looking to something more akin to the 'Minister' model - with a local centre of excellence, where the very best of liturgy and music can be combined with excellent preaching and teaching; and then other local centres of mission which are all differently trying to engage with their context. Something more fluid, more responsive, more contextualised? Either way, we cannot simply go on as we are....

Perhaps one of the less surprising reasons the Leslie Francis and Philip Richter found for church leaving, especially amongst younger people, was the issue of relevance. Just what is the relevance of much that goes on in churches on a typical Sunday morning to the everyday lives of people who live in today's world? It's a question that we cannot duck.

This came through in the interviews are everything from people who thought that the sermons were boring, to those who complained that church teaching had no application to modern life, through to those who thought that the church seemed 'to be on another planet'

'A couple of, like, friends my age left, that I know, and really they just don't feel that the church has anything relevant to them, and anything to offer them. And, you know, people are just becoming really disillusioned with the church, because everybody thinks its dying....'

If that response is typical it seems that for a large group of people, there is an intangible sense of irrelevance that people find quite hard to articulate - it's more of ' a sense of irrelevance', that church no longer connects them in any meaningful way with the world outside the hallowed walls. For some people, it had something to do with the strangeness of what often goes on in church

'there's no other aspect of life where you'd go on sitting in a room do these strange actions, these standing up and sitting down, and singing along with the children, doing the actions in the choruses, and listening to someone who doesn't really know what they are talking about talking at you for twenty minutes. So why do you have to do that for religion? It's not something that makes any sense....'

It's pretty hard to come up with an immediate response to that sort of critique. And, before anything thinks that the report is taking a pot shot at the low church evangelicals, precisely the same critique can be made about the oddness of the ceremonial and ritual of the high church style of worship...

This general feeling of irrelevance of sermons, worship and liturgy is surely a contributory factor to the view, confirmed by this report, that around 75% of church leavers consider that 'you don't need to go to church to be a Christian'. It's also the case that this group of people, around 40% of the respondents, is one of the groups least likely to ever want to return.

Until the Church is able to deconstruct much of its inherited traditions and reimagine itself in ways that will connect with the contemporary culture, then it is not only hard to see how it can reconnect with leavers, but it is almost a guarantee that more and more people will leave for the same reasons in the future. Balancing the need to value our historical traditions, whilst also recasting the church for a postmodern generation is one of the key challenges facing us in years to come.

The PDL is a monthly e-zine for all kinds of writing about emerging and missional Christianity, the title being a fairly obvious pun on that other and (we have to be honest) rather more well known publication :)

My good blogging friend John Smulo was 'guest editor' this month and invited me - along with some familiar faces in the emerging blogging scene - to contribute articles. I wrote a piece called 'Small is Beautiful', which looked at how much of Jesus' ministry was with individuals and small groups of people. Some of the other great people included were Glenn Hager, Jamie-Arpin-Ricci and Julie Clawson, whilst the editor-in-chief Bill Dahl contibuted another review of the hottest book in the missional blogosphere 'Pagan Christianity' by George Barna and Frank Viola. I've currently got this winging towards me via Amazon, and look forward to reading it soon....

I'll certainly be reading PDL each month from now - if you've never tried it, then what are you waiting for? Get along to Porpoise Diving Life 

In a way, this next category outlined by Francis and Richter takes the idea of being disappointed by church that we looked at yesterday, and takes it up another notch. But, whereas those who feel disappointed are likely to drift away unnoticed, unheralded - perhaps even unnoticed, those who are badly let down by the church are more likely to come to public notice.

Who are those who feel let down?    Three common themes emerged.

• the lack of care and support that people felt, often at times of acute need.
• the lack of professionalism shown by clergy and other church leaders (this sometimes was around the area of dealing with actual or alleged child abuse
• the abuse of power, which in extreme cases manifested as physical or sexual abuse of church members by those in positions of authority 

Whilst the numbers involved in the latter two categories are smaller than we have been seeing in other categories (around 5%), it is clear that for those affected the issues are extremely serious and have caused deep wounds that are unlikely to result in any of those people ever returning to the church. Whilst recognising the very serious nature of these sorts of allegations, the report also sounds a note of caution

the culture of placing blame on the clergy has been more prevalent within the past twenty years. In this context, pastoral care needs to be extended not only to the church leaver who goes away blaming the clergy, but also to the clergy who carry the weight of blame and the potential consequential guilt. Often the expectations that others place on the clergy are too high.  Often the expectations that clergy place on themselves are too high 

Who'd be a clergyperson or full-time church leader in today's world?  And yet, only partly can the answer be found by the current practice of devolving much pastoral work to lay people. Whilst this is good New Testament theology, it isn't the case that those who feel 'a calling' to help in the pastoral ministry of the church are necessarily gifted and equipped for the role - making the provision of adequate and appropriate training highly necessary. Clearly ,we have a way to go yet in grappling with these issues!